According to Jack Darrell Crowder, author of Strange, Amazing, and Funny Events that Happened during the Revolutionary War, many females served in that conflict. Some of them were camp followers accompanying their husbands or other family members; however, others were hoping to support themselves or were simply out for adventure. In a few recorded instances,[…]Read more
Genealogists and historians will be eager to examine Paul Heinegg’s third major contribution to the literature of African American history and genealogy of 2021: List of Free African Americans in the American Revolution: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware (Followed by French and Indian Wars and Colonial Militias) In this new book, Mr.[…]Read more
Quicksheet: The Historical Biographer’s Guide to Individual Problem Analysis, from renowned genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills, addresses the nature and evaluation of evidence, not citation, thereby addressing the process of research head-on. Recognizing that solutions to tough research problems require thoughtful analysis, Mrs. Mills has designed a 10-step solution to genealogical problems to help researchers construct[…]Read more
Margaret D. Pagan’s new book, African American News in the Baltimore Sun, 1870-1927, rescues and makes available information about what was, as late as 1870, the largest urban black population in the U.S. Beginning with coverage at perhaps the high point of the Reconstruction era in the U.S., the Sun published stories about politics, education,[…]Read more
As we reported in December, Paul Heinegg’s new book, List of Free African Americans in the American Revolution: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware (Followed by French and Indian Wars and Colonial Militias), presents the service or pension records of nearly 1,000 free African Americans who served in the War for Independence from[…]Read more
The earliest newspapers in the United States were published starting in 1720. Printing presses were heavy and had to be imported from England. Happy was the colony that could have its own newspaper. Newspapers printed local news, news from other colonies, but news from Europe often occupied the front page. Marriages and deaths of local[…]Read more
Another great feature of How to find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records: A Genealogist’s Guide, by Sunny Jane Morton and Harold A. Henderson, is the chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the kinds of records that were kept by the 12 major denominations in the United States as of 1900. For each denomination covered, the authors[…]Read more
For anyone interested in his or her own genealogical links to medieval Europe and early Christianity, Alan Koman’s book, A Who’s Who of Your Ancestral Saints, offers an extraordinary opportunity. In fact, Mr. Koman has retold the lives of 275 early European saints and attached to those biographies the lineages that connect the saints to[…]Read more
Did you know that the Navajo and related tribes migrated from Northwest Canada and present-day Alaska to present-day Arizona and New Mexico, and ultimately southeastern Utah, roughly 600 years ago? Would it surprise you to learn that the indigenous people of Hawaii are closely related to indigenous people of the Pacific Islands, Polynesia, Australia, and[…]Read more
Brian Mitchell’s New Pocket Guide to Irish Genealogy is a wonderful combination of how-to book, guide to sources, and case studies–in only 120 pages. It’s expert genealogist Mitchell’s contention that the most important sources for Irish genealogy are the civil registers of births, marriages, and deaths; church registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials; gravestone inscriptions;[…]Read more
Since most digitized German papers are fully searchable, Ernest Thode’s revised guide to these newspapers, indicating newspaper title, place of publication, date range, and website, is an unprecedented key to a mother lode of information found in German-language papers. As the author explains below: “Few historic German newspapers have been digitized until the past few[…]Read more
If tracing your German origins requires that you read documents written in German—if you plan to research ones from the 19th-century or earlier it’s a virtual certainty you will—Ernest Thode’s classic dictionary is one book you should own. This book is designed for the family researcher who has little or no knowledge of German but[…]Read more
